To summarize: My friend Chris Caldwell asks whether the southern base of the
Republican Party has pushed the party so far right on what he calls "values"
issues that it has doomed the party to "obsolescence." Citing one poll in
The Washington Post, and adopting a faulty analysis of the 1996
elections, he answers his own question with a yes.

I say no. To believe Caldwell's analysis you have to believe that Bob Dole lost
the presidential election in 1996 because he moved too far to the right on
social issues (in order to appease the South) to be able also to win the swing
states of the industrial Midwest that are necessary for a Republican
presidential victory. That is ludicrous. Dole didn't embrace the southern
Christian view on social issues -- he ran from it.

In his response, Caldwell counters my assertion that he should have used
"actual election results" to back up his claim that the Republican Party is
becoming "obsolescent" by saying that "any article that focuses, as mine did,
on the collapse of the national Republican Party since they retook Congress has
only one set of 'actual election results' to work with: those of 1996, in which
the Republicans got clocked, in both presidential and congressional races."
Again, this is a fallacy: in 1996, the Republicans did not "get clocked" in
both presidential and congressional races. They got clocked in the
presidential race. They won the congressional race. Any analysis of
Republican failure in 1996 must focus on Dole's losing campaign, not on the
more than four hundred individual House and Senate campaigns that took place
that year. In 1996, for the first time in many decades, the Republicans
retained a majority in Congress. They won twenty-one of the thirty-four seats
that were up for grabs in the Senate, expanding their majority by two. That is
not just a victory -- it is a remarkable triumph, considering that Republican
efforts were weighed down all across the country by Dole's leaden national
campaign.

Caldwell defends the so-called Finkelstein Box against my assertion that it is
bogus by claiming that the box "is a device to illustrate geographic voting
patterns in the most recent elections." But that is not how Caldwell presented
it in his Atlantic Monthly piece, where he called it "a simple graphic
device to show how differentiated the country is." Even on that level it
doesn't hold up as anything more than a Rorschach image of the "cultural biases
of a New York-based political consultant."

A demographic division of the country like Finkelstein's Box which lumps states
with pro-life governors like Terry Branstad of Iowa and Tommy Thompson of
Wisconsin into the same cultural landscape with Paul Cellucci's Massachusetts
and Christine Todd Whitman's New Jersey is an artificial construct that ignores
the real cultural and political divides in the country.

The states most pivotal to a Republican presidential victory in 2000 are in the
northern midwest, not the northeast. In the northern midwest Catholic pro-life
Republican governors predominate. Dole lost these states. Why? Because he
didn't appeal at all to Catholic pro-life voters. How do you appeal to those
voters? Exactly the same way you appeal to southern Christian voters.

If the Republicans nominate another candidate, like George Bush or Bob Dole,
who is not only an internationalist but also is embarrassed by the unapologetic
social conservatism of southern Christians and Roman Catholics, the Republicans
may indeed be headed for failure -- but for the exact opposite reasons that
Caldwell states.

Just after the 1992 Democratic Convention, Stanley Greenberg himself wrote a
memo to Bill Clinton. The memo was drafted as if it had been composed by an
aide to President Bush advising Bush on his best chances for winning
reelection. Greenberg's memo was later leaked to E. J. Dionne at The
Washington Post, who wrote about it in a November 7, 1992, story headlined,
"A Strategy for Winning That Bush Never Saw; Mock Memo From Clinton Aide:
Attack the Democrats on 'Values' and Untrustworthiness."

Dionne reported that the purpose of Greenberg's memo "was to warn the Clinton
campaign -- at a time when it was flying high after the Democratic convention
-- that there were ways in which Clinton's large lead might be undermined."
Dionne continued, "Greenberg based his memo on polling and focus groups in
which he tested voter response to a variety of attacks against the Arkansas
governor." So what attacks would have worked for Bush and could have defeated
Clinton? Clinton, Greenberg said, "must be seen as culturally permissive,
promising the world to gays, lesbians, and extreme feminists and out-of-touch
with southern voters in particular." Greenberg said Bush could beat Clinton if
he succeeded in "making clear how far Clinton is from the mainstream on family
values." That was Greenberg's biggest fear in 1992: that George Bush would run
as a social conservative, defining Clinton as an extremist on southern "values"
issues.

But Bush didn't do it, and he lost. If you take Greenberg at his word -- in
his own memo to his own candidate -- it is no wonder he now encourages
Caldwell's analysis of Republican failure. Greenberg knows this analysis, if
put into action, would recapitulate the mistakes of the Bush and Dole campaigns
and guarantee rather than avert future Republican failures.

What do you think?

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